New reviews

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• Urban-geek fiction

• Slumberland, by Paul Beatty

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• Paul Beatty writes an acerbic and hilarious new novel about race, gender and Berlin.

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• Bio of a band

• Goodbye 20th Century, by David Browne

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• David Browne delivers a book-length profile of Sonic Youth.

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• Bleak stories of the semisupernatural

• Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

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• Irish author Claire Keegan delivers a new batch of lost souls.

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• Poetic musings on the unspeakable

• Watching the Spring Festival, by Frank Bidart

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• Desire is Frank Bidart’s great subject—how it abuses and disfigures us.

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• Lost meets Jean Rhys

• The Changeling, by Joy Williams

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• A gin-soaked fairy tale comes back to haunt us.

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• African political satire

• The Book of Chameleons, by José Eduardo Agualusa

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• A gecko narrates this novel about people hoping to erase attrocities in their pasts.

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• Gothic family reunion

• The Sister, by Poppy Adams

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• This British novel's narrator is obviously unhinged. But why?

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• Food fiction

• Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, by Lara Vapnyar

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• Recipes cap off this droll story collection about former-USSR émigrés.

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• Portrait of a bygone underground scene

• No Wave, by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley

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• Musicians and others recall New York's inimitable postpunk movement.

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• Hamlet meets Marley and Me

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

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• Mystical dogs help a mute in this novel of murder and mayhem.

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• Self-consciously weird stories

• Farewell Navigator, by Leni Zumas

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• A magic realist imagines a world of angsty teens, would-be witches and the institutionalized.

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• Well-wrought addiction drama

• Cost, by Roxana Robinson

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• Family relationships lead characters to unstable territory in this thoughtful new novel.

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• Views from an ambulance

• Black Flies, by Shannon Burke

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• A fictional paramedic wonders: What happens when attrocities become commonplace?

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• Manic monologue

• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

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• Terror rules the life of a copy editor in a fictional Latin American nation.

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• An Austrian couple goes Bonny and Clyde

• The Post-Office Girl, by Stefan Zweig

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• A mail-sorter gets a taste of the high life, turns to crime.

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• A glam band's artsy roots

• Re-make/Re-model, by Michael Bracewell

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• Roxy Music's members and their muses recall the band's arty beginnings.

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• Meditations on a murder

• While They Slept, by Kathryn Harrison

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• Harrison probes a teen's brutal killing of his parents and sister.

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• Alt-comics guide to creativity

• What It Is, by Lynda Barry

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• Cartoonist Barry wants everyone to be as creative as her.

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• Novel of wrecklessness

• Breath, by Tim Winton

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• Austalian boys flirt with danger as they come of age.

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• Art criticism

• Let’s See, by Peter Schjeldahl

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• Picasso, Joni Mitchell and others are given their due in passionate essays.

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• Family memoir

• The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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• Coates recalls his inner-city upbringing and his dad's valiant parenting.

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• Office horrors

• Personal Days, by Ed Park

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• A rash of mysterious firings at a New York office takes a sinster edge in this comic debut.

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• Contemporary sonnets

• Nomina, by Karen Volkman

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• Volkman skillfully tackles the art of sonnet writing.

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• Filmmaker biography

• Everything Is Cinema The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody

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• The innovative French director's life unfolds.

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• Highly stylized prep-school angst

• All Souls, by Christine Schutt

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• Schutt sets her new novel at an Upper East Side prep school.

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• Abu Ghraib investigation

• Standard Operating Procedure, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

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• Guilt and abuse are widespread in this look at a military scandal.

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• Stylish poetry meets punk sensibility

• The Weaklings, by Dennis Cooper

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• A novelist triumphantly returns to verse.

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• Globe-spanning stories

• The Boat, by Nam Le

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• Le's short tales take place on four different continents.

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• Zeitgeist reporting

• The Great Derangement, by Matt Tiabbi

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• A gonzo journalist discovers a disillusioned and deluded America.

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• Dark adolesence

• The God of War, by Marisa Silver

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• A boy's violent young life is played out in the bleak California desert.

Featured stories

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• Hell is for children

• Joyce Carol Oates exhumes a real-life tabloid tragedy.

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• Down the Rabbit hole

• Darin Strauss pens an Updike-ian novel about a medical scandal.

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• The bottle is half empty

• An eco-journalist dives into the water industry.

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• Use your delusion

• Rivka Galchen imagines a man who thinks his wife has been replaced by a fake.

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• Meds, math and beyond

• Reporter Julie Salamon profiles a chaotic Brooklyn hospital.

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• A crook's tour

• Rick Perlstein captures the divisive political moment of Richard Nixon.

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• Caste in doubt

• Aravind Adiga pens a satire of class conflict in India.

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• Shelf esteem

• Literary agents, editors and publicists weigh in on the unpredictable world of publishing.

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• True grit

• In Lush Life, Richard Price captures the Lower East Side in all its grimy glory.

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